SACP to forge ahead without ANC
THE decision by the SACP to contest the 2019 general elections may augur well both for itself and the policymakers within the governing ANC alike.
The electorate’s fear of the communists in the tripartite alliance has forced the party to remain in a marriage of inconvenience even when the antagonisms between the broader left of the alliance and the ANC in government were becoming irreconcilable.
Communists the world over pride themselves on possessing a systematically elaborated and rational explanatory model of the world they seek to change and they base all their activities on this model.
In the context of the ruling ANC-led alliance in democratic South Africa, the activities of the SACP can be characterised, for the most part, as reactionary.
This is due to its failure to accept government policies shortly before the turn of the 21st century, that had to be pursued in a changing reality.
Its refusal to embrace the realistic and pragmatic in favour of dogmatic ideological thinking has led it to lose touch with reality and forced it to develop practices based on false conclusions.
This error has also had a negative impact on the government’s efforts to create an effective developmental state with the capacity to deliver services to historically excluded communities, efforts to change the racial composition of owners of capital, and to move the economy off a limited growth path to one of inclusion and opportunity for all.
Owing to South Africa being an open economy, the country’s interaction and integration with the rest of world economy forced government policymakers to adopt strategic policy postures to a simplistic mind, at odds with the goals of the RDP policy.
The SACP – the vanguard of the working class – under the leadership of Blade Nzimande, armed with revolutionary Marxist-Leninist tools of analysis, strangely became oblivious to the reality of an open economy presenting not only positive potentialities but also problems and limitations.
It lambasted what it derogatorily christened “the 1996 class project”.
In reaction to the adoption of the Gear strategy, it embarked on an ambitious drive to swell the ranks of the ANC rather than going it alone.
This after it engaged in lengthy, heated debates about the need to leave the alliance and contest elections on its own.
At the same time Cosatu would embark on economically crippling general strikes in an effort to force the government to abandon what it termed its neo-liberal policies.
It ignored the reality of an open economy being susceptible to global economic crises and shocks, and chose to elevate the failures following the adoption of Gear as solely a result of that policy strategy.
The growth, employment and redistribution macro-economic framework was never going to be a panacea for all South Africa’s developmental challenges because it was not a perfect strategy.
The effect of global economic crises and shocks on an open economy such as ours ought to be factored-in in any honest critique of the performance of government economic policies.
The performance of Gear, like any other macro-economic strategy that would have been adopted, was impacted heavily by the global financial crisis that reached South Africa in 1998 and the sharp decline of South African exports from 1995 to 2000. This culminated in massive shedding of labour in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Put differently, the full potential of Gear was never realised partly because of the difficulties imposed by the nature and reality of the global economy.
The SACP’s remaining in the alliance in the face of growing strains in its relationship with the ANC government has helped fragment the very constituency it claims to be its vanguard.
Its unwavering support for Jacob Zuma even when it was apparent that he was and is a burden has helped drive the 350 000-member-strong Numsa out of Cosatu along with Zwelinzima Vavi.
The SACP, together with Zuma and his faction in the ANC, have succeeded in doing what they’ve always accused Thabo Mbeki of doing, and that is dividing the alliance.
The watershed decision by the SACP on July 15 may help policymakers in the governing party formulate policies without the burden of having to appease an alliance partner by compromising on the need to avoid the danger of populist policy prescriptions.
Equally, it carries the possibility for the party to lead forces genuinely committed to the victory of the socialist revolution without the burden of having to compromise on their revolutionary goals to please government policymakers.
Ntsikelelo “Sparks” Limba, Motherwell, Port Elizabeth